An interesting oped today in The Washington Post explores the effects of sexism in literature. Julianna Baggott offers provocative evidence that men are far more likely than women to achieve literary success, for equivalent efforts. I was especially taken with the research she cites that shows when volunteers think a play is written by a man, they rate is as superior to the very same play — when the volunteers think it has been written by a woman.
The power of this experiment lies in the fact that it is perfectly controlled: If you were to compare a play actually written by a man to a play actually written by a woman, the plays themselves are different, so we don’t have a good way of telling whether the judgment of volunteers is being driven by sexism or the literary merits of the two plays. In the experiment Baggott describes, the play remains the same, so the only thing that can plausibly explain the difference in the perceptions of volunteers has to be the one thing that was changed – the sex of the playwright.
I delve into the research on sexism in a chapter of The Hidden Brain, where I try to grapple with the problem that in real life, we almost never have effective controls. Baggott cites research that shows, on aggregate, men are far more likely to achieve literary success than women, and I believe this is evidence that sexism is at work. But that insight is not helpful when it comes to individual books, plays, authors and readers, because there are always idiosyncratic factors at play in every individual situation. Can one reader’s positive judgment of a book stem from the fact that he or she happens to like the theme being written about? Sure. Can a particular book’s failure stem from the fact that it is, in fact, a lousy book? Of course. Might an individual writer’s stellar reviews arise from the fact that that he or she is in fact a stellar writer? Obviously. The individual writer who gets passed over by critics and the marketplace is left with more questions than answers.
In the chapter called The Invisible Current, I show how, in at least in some situations, men and women can become their own control groups. If you believe we live in a post-sexist world, the evidence will surprise you.
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